NPR Music site launched

The halls of National Public Radio are abuzz after the launch of the new NPR Music site. Today, NPR and twelve (12) public radio partners launched the free, multi-genre Web site which presents the best of public radio music.

NPR Music aims to be as diverse as its audience's interests and curiosity. That's why Jazz Profiles lives alongside World Café and Classics in Concert, and why the site features everyone from Aaron Copland and Aaron Neville, to Dan Zanes and Joe Zawinul.

The site includes new artist pages, music blogs, and archived concerts. There is also a new media player which allows you to set up playlists of favorite NPR stories.

To read more about this new site, click HERE

Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna

From The New Yorker's Alex Ross:

"In a handsome twist of fate, [Arnold Schoenberg] the most famously difficult composer of the twentieth century is now the most instantly accessible: possibly no modern artist has such a large Web presence. On the site, you can read immaculate digital reproductions of Schoenberg’s correspondence, listen to his complete works on streaming audio, examine his designs for various inventions and gadgets (including a typewriter for musical notation), and follow links to YouTube videos of him playing tennis..." [Oct. 22, 2007]

To see to the Schoenberg Center's website, click HERE

To read Mr. Ross's entire article on, "The Well-tempered Web: the internet may be killing the pop CD, but it’s helping classical music ", click HERE

Movies' Unforgettable Music

Danny Elfman has created the music for dozens of movies and TV shows, from Tim Burton's Batman to The Simpsons. But when NPR asked the film composer to name his favorite movies to watch, he couldn't quite decide.

To read and listen to the entire interview, click HERE

Eric Clapton Looks Back at His Blues Roots

Eric Clapton has been reinventing himself musically for more than 40 years. But the strong pulse of the Blues has powered his guitar playing since the beginning: from the Yardbirds when he was 18, through his stints with John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, Cream, and Derek and the Dominoes, to today.

To read and listen to the interview from NPR's All Things Considered, click HERE

Backstage at Lyric

A new series called "Backstage at Lyric" from the Lyric Opera of Chicago features in-depth interviews with the singers, conductors, and creative minds behind the productions of the 2007/08 season.

The series launches with an engaging and informative interview with soprano Elizabeth Futral and tenor Joseph Calleja, who are currently rehearsing
La traviata.

Lyric Opera dramaturg Roger Pines hosts this first episode. Download and enjoy!

Two Musicians win MacArthur grants

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced the winners of the MacArthur fellowships. The fellowships, or "genius awards," as they are commonly called, recognize people in a variety of fields for their creativity and promise. Each new fellow receives an award of $500,000, which is meant to encourage future exploration and comes with no strings attached.

Among the 24 winners for 2007 are two musicians:

Corey Harris, a blues musician who is leading a revival of Mississippi
Delta blues by infusing traditional styles with influences from jazz,
reggae gospel, and African and Caribbean folk styles.

To read more about Corey Harris, click HERE

Dawn Upshaw, a master vocalist who stretches the boundaries of operatic
and concert singing and enriches the landscape of contemporary
performance through her advocacy of established and emerging composers.

To read an article about Upshaw from NPR's Tom Huizenga, click HERE

From The Silk Road Project

How goes the Silk Road Project? Since Alex Ross wrote about Yo-Yo Ma's innovative multicultural music series in The New Yorker back in 2002, Mr. Ross has kept an eye on the Project's progress across the country and around the world. On the occasion of the release of the latest Silk Road CD, New Impossibilities (Sony Classical), Mr. Ross spoke to Ma about how the project has evolved and how it has affected his musicianship.

To read the entire interview, click HERE

Jazz Legend Joe Zawinul, 1932-2007

Jazz legend Joe Zawinul, who soared to fame as one of the creators of jazz fusion and performed and recorded with Miles Davis, died early Tuesday, a hospital official said. He was 75.

To read the entire article at All About Jazz, click HERE

Luciano Pavarotti, 1935-2007

The world has lost one of the most famous opera singers of our time. Luciano Pavarotti died at his home in Italy after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 71 years old.

To hear excerpts of the famous tenor's singing and read a remembrance from NPR, click HERE

To read the BBC's news release, click HERE. And to watch a performance from a 1979 production of La Bohème with soprano Ileana Cotrubas at La Scala, click HERE

Chat with the Music Liaison

Are you in the midst of a project and need advice on finding more resources? I have set up a chat box on this site for Columbia College Music students and faculty. When I am at my desk, you can use the box on the right titled “Ask Lauren” to send me an instant message. I’ll do my best to assist you. Or if you prefer, you can click on "Contact" under my profile for traditional email.

Please send me your name with your first post.

Max Roach, a Founder of Modern Jazz, Dies at 83

Max Roach, a founder of modern jazz who rewrote the rules of drumming in the 1940’s and spent the rest of his career breaking musical barriers and defying listeners’ expectations, died Thursday, August 16th in Manhattan. He was 83.

As a young man, Mr. Roach, a percussion virtuoso capable of playing at the most brutal tempos with subtlety as well as power, was among a small circle of adventurous musicians who brought about wholesale changes in jazz. He remained adventurous to the end.

To read an article about Roach from Drummerworld, click HERE

To read the entire New York Times obituary, click HERE

Terence Blanchard: Rebuilding New Orleans in Song

New Orleans native son Terence Blanchard has created an impassioned song cycle, A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina), as his third album for Blue Note Records.

An important jumpstart for A Tale of God’s Will was director Spike Lee’s decision to document the aftermath of Katrina on film, in what turned out to be the four-hour award-winning HBO documentary, When the Levees Broke, which aired last year. Lee, who has enlisted Blanchard on numerous occasions to score his films, tapped him once again for his documentary.

Josh Jackson asked Blanchard to talk about his music for the Lee documentary. Jackson also asked him to play the piano.

To hear Blanchard's performance and an interview with Jackson on NPR from New Orleans click HERE

Bobby Sanabria's Latin Jazz Hybrid

Growing up in the South Bronx, Bobby Sanabria was exposed to a wide range of music: Latin, Afro-Cuban, blues, jazz, funk, rock. He became a fan of Tito Puente, Dizzy Gillespie, Buddy Rich, James Brown and Mario Bauzá, among others.

Later, Sanabria performed alongside many of those legendary musicians. Now his name is included in the short list of renowned drummers and percussionists, and he's determined to make sure that the musical mélange of his past continues in the future.

To read the article and listen to the NPR interview, click HERE

Marian McPartland to be inducted into National Radio Hall of Fame

Jazz Icon, Marian McPartland, will be one of five inductees into the National Radio Hall of Fame in Chicago in a ceremony to be held November 3rd of this year.

Host of Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz for more than 25 years, McPartland taught herself how to play piano at age three. Since 1978 the English born jazz musician has hosted one of the longest running weekly programs on NPR. McPartland is revered for her own talent and welcomes a wide range of guests to her program, including legendary jazz artists and fledgling jazz talents.

To read all about the National Radio Hall of Fame as well as to find out more about the Museum of Broadcast Communications, which is scheduled for opening in 2008 in downtown Chicago, click HERE

At the Concert Hall, a Symphony for Space Invaders

The average concertgoer might not expect to hear music from Super Mario Bros. at the local symphony hall — of if they did hear it, they might look around to see who smuggled in the Game Boy.

But that may be changing. A touring multimedia show that has already been seen by more than 100,000 people is playing at the world's finest concert halls — with the world's finest orchestras powering through some of the world's most popular video-game music.

To read the article and listen to NPR's segment by Benjamin Frisch, click HERE

Lee Hazlewood: Writer Gave Music Biz the 'Boots'

Lee Hazlewood, the reclusive songwriter and producer behind a slew of hits by Duane Eddy, Nancy Sinatra, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin in the 1950s and 1960s, including Ms. Sinatra's No. 1 smash "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'," died on Saturday in Henderson, Nev. He was 78.

To listen to a remembrance of Hazlewood from NPR's Felix Contreras, click HERE

To read the entire New York Times obituary, click HERE

Tanglewood Festival: Male Singers Need Not Apply

In case you missed this in the New York Times' ArtsBeat the other day...One new twist at Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music is the involvement of a scholar in residence, to put the festival’s composers and music in perspective. This year's scholar in residence, Judith Tick, drew animated audience discussion, including comments from several composers, with a surprising statistic to the effect that some 70 percent of contemporary vocal music is written for the female voice.

To read the complete article, click HERE

“Alice in Wonderland” in Munich

"The labyrinthine fantasy of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” begins in deceptively lulling tones, with the idyllic phrase “All in the golden afternoon.” Unsuk Chin’s opera “Alice in Wonderland,” which recently had its première at the Bavarian State Opera, in Munich, opens in distinctly more ominous fashion...
Chin, who was born in Seoul in 1961, and has been living in Berlin since 1988, has a knack for binding together seemingly irreconcilable extremes. A youthful enthusiast of the late-twentieth-century European avant-garde, she studied in the eighties with György Ligeti, a pioneer of alien soundscapes."

To read Alex Ross's complete article from The New Yorker, click HERE

Igor Stravinsky: The Recorded Legacy

The Library has just acquired a box set collection of Igor Stravinsky's recorded legacy. "...in terms of archival importance,[Stravinsky's] discography, especially the Columbia recordings now reissued on Sony Classical, is the greatest landmark in the history of recorded music from the classical tradition." The New York Times, June 1999
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A Hypnotic Collaboration

The notion of Philip Glass and Leonard Cohen collaborating seems so natural that it’s strange that Mr. Glass’s new “Book of Longing” brings them together for a full-length work the first time.

For “Book of Longing,” which had its New York premiere at the Rose Theater on Saturday evening, July 14th, as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, Mr. Glass chose 22 poems from Mr. Cohen’s 2006 compilation of the same name. Mr. Cohen’s drawings are used as well, arrayed on a gallerylike wall behind the ensemble, with a central video screen showing a continually morphing selection.

To read a review of this performance from the New York Times, click HERE

Bach and Beethoven -- Complete Works

The Library has recently acquired two exciting new additions to our Sound Recording Collection:
The Complete works of J.S. Bach, issued on the Brilliant Classics label. This box set includes 155 cds, new recordings by prominent Bach performers such as The Sixteen, La Stravaganza Köln with Andrew Manze, cellist Jaap ter Linden and Musica Amphion.
This edition was first issued in 23 installments to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the death of J.S. Bach. It contains every piece of his known to exist at the time.

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In addition we have just received the Complete works of Beethoven, issued by Cascade Medienproduktions:

This is the first comprehensive Beethoven Edition available on the market, and includes 748 works on 87 CDs. This edition was compiled on the basis of the renowned "Beethoven Compendium“ by Barry Cooper (Thames & Hudson Ltd., London 1991). The recordings are characterized by high-quality performances presented by renowned conductors, orchestras and soloists.

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Beverly Sills, 1929-2007

Beverly Sills, the acclaimed Brooklyn-born coloratura soprano who was more popular with the American public than any opera singer since Enrico Caruso, even among people who never set foot in an opera house, died on Monday, July 2nd, at her home in Manhattan. She was 78.

To read the entire New York Times obituary, click HERE

Bjarne Brustad- Music for Violin and Viola

The Library has recently acquired an exciting new recording: violinist and Grieg Trio member Sølve Sigerland has chosen to explore Bjarne Brustad’s (1895-1978) violin capriccios with skilled support from violist Lars Anders Tomter. Brustad was one of the first Norwegian composers to embrace impressionism, and at a later stage he developed a strong interest in Norwegian folklore and neo-classicism. The works on this disc showcase the composer’s life-long project; to capture a national and modern tonal language.

To read about this recent recording and hear excerpts from it, click HERE

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The jazz image : masters of jazz photography

No mean jazz photographer himself--see his Images of Jazz (1996)--Lee Tanner generously shares space with his peers in this album for which he wrote the historical preface, explaining why jazz photography is an after-1930 development.

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Fugue for Man and Machine

Classical musicians have bitterly opposed replacing human players with computers in the orchestra pit. Now, a small group is breaking ranks -- and arguing that it's the best hope for revitalizing the art. Cue the laptop.

To read the entire article from the Wall Street Journal, click HERE

And for more information on digital orchestra music, visit the Digital Orchestra League's website HERE

Benny Golson: From Jazz to Hollywood and back

Saxophone player Benny Golson played with jazz greats Dizzy Gillespie and Art Blakey, and wrote music for the TV shows M*A*S*H and Mission Impossible. On NPR's Morning Edition, he talks about his role in reshaping Blakey's band as well as the bit part in a Stephen Spielberg movie that helped revitalize his career.

To read the article and listen to the NPR interview, click HERE

Mstislav Rostropovich, Dissident Maestro, Dies

Mstislav Rostropovich, the cellist and conductor who was renowned not only as one of the great instrumentalists of the 20th century but also as an outspoken champion of artistic freedom in the Soviet Union during the last decades of the cold war, died on April 27th in Moscow.

To read the entire New York Times obituary, click HERE

41st ARSC Conference in Milwaukee

This year's "Association for Recorded Sound Collections" conference theme featured presentations dealing with the dawn of recorded sound and the transition from mechanical musical instruments (music boxes, player pianos and orchestrions) to devices meant to capture and/or reproduce sound (phonographs and magnetic recorders). To learn more about the ARSC Conference, click HERE

Andrew Hill: 1931-2007

Andrew Hill, a pianist and composer of highly original and sometimes opaquely inner-dwelling jazz whose work only recently found a wide audience, died Friday, April 20th, at his home in Jersey City. He was 75.

To read the New York Times obituary, click HERE

Ornette Coleman wins Pulitzer

Alto saxophonist and free jazz visionary Ornette Coleman won the Pulitzer Prize for music for his 2006 album, Sound Grammar. His is the first jazz album in history to win this coveted prize.

Read the complete article from Jazz Times HERE

Jazz, Giants and Journeys: The Photography of Herman Leonard

With a camera as his backstage pass, Herman Leonard has photographed the giants of jazz in their golden age, movie stars on set and on their travels to exotic places, the fashion world of Paris in the 1960s, and the inner sanctums of his beloved New Orleans. His friendships with the jazz greats allowed him to vividly capture the magical moments of the Harlem and Paris jazz clubs in the 1940s and 50s, ...
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Amazing Grace

The Library of Congress announces the launch of a new website devoted to the history of the hymn *Amazing Grace,* and the Library's Chasanoff/Elozua Amazing Grace Collection, which is comprised of 3,049 published recordings of the hymn by different individual musicians or musical ensembles. This a joint venture of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, the Music Division, and the American Folklife Center.

Since its creation in 1779 in England, *Amazing Grace* has grown in popularity to become one of the best-known musical works in the world. This Web site explores its history through items from the collections of the Library of Congress, from the earliest printing of the song to various performances of it on sound recordings.

The audio collection and database, compiled by Allan Chasanoff and Ramon Elozua, and given to the Library in 2004, is in the Guinness Book of World's Records as the largest collection of recordings of a single musical work. The website includes a number of selections from the collection, from gospel renditions by Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the Mighty Clouds of Joy, an Elvis Presley recording, country versions by Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson to rock versions by the Byrds and the Lemonheads. A database for the entire collection can be searched on the site, and the complete audio collection is available for listening in the Library of Congress* Recorded Sound Reference Center.

To visit the website, click HERE

6th Annual Jazz Appreciation Month

What is Jazz Appreciation Month?
The concept is simple: designate one month for an annual public spotlight on jazz. Jazz Appreciation Month (or JAM) is intended to draw public attention to the glories of jazz as both an historical and a living treasure. The idea is to encourage musicians, concert halls, schools, colleges, museums, libraries, and public broadcasters to offer special programs on jazz every April.

Among other events and activities this year, the National Museum of American History is inaugurating a jazz discussion board. Come join the discussion!

To learn all about this, go to Smithsonian Jazz, a jazz portal for the Smithsonian Institute.

Pearls Before Breakfast

Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let's find out.

HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L'ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday,...

Read the whole article from the Washington Post HERE

NewMusicBox

NewMusicBox is an innovative resource developed by the American Music Center that provides news, information and forums for the American composer and those interested in American music. NewMusicBox provides opportunities for editorials and discussions about current issues in music. The site provides an RSS feed. You will also find online concert web-casts. There is also a companion site to NewMusicBox, the NewMusicJukebox that enables composers to submit profiles, sound files and scores to the online community. Explore NewMusicBox and feel free to post your comments about it below.

Digital Mozart Edition

Last December, an exciting new resource was announced.

A digital version of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe (the critical edition of complete works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) is now available for personal study and for educational and classroom use compliments of the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum and the Packard Humanities Institute.

According to the International Stiftung Mozarteum, the Digital Mozart Edition:
“is a digital version of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe (NMA; New Mozart Edition), a scholarly edition of Mozart’s complete works that was compiled by musicologists from around the world in the last 50 years . . . It aims at facilitating the systematic research on Mozart for musicologists and performers as well as making Mozart’s scores available to non-specialists with a simple, user-friendly interface. The initiators have acquired all digital rights to the NMA from Bärenreiter-Verlag in Kassel, the publisher of the printed edition.”

Hoping to Move Guitar Notations Into the Legal Sunshine

IF budding guitarists fail to master "Stairway to Heaven" in the coming months, they can no longer blame the music publishers.

Because of an agreement in March between MusicNotes, an online music publisher and the Harry Fox Agency, which represents 31,000 music publishers, guitar tablature -- a popular system for teaching and learning guitar -- will enter the legitimate business realm for the first time.

Read the whole article from the New York Times HERE